Hawaii Snow Day

I’ve always enjoyed Minnesota snow days. Heavy snow, schools shut, commerce pauses, we all get to stay home and cocoon.

This morning we woke to warnings from the National Weather Service that there would be blizzards on Hawaii Big Island where we’re staying right now. We were unperturbed. Admittedly, it was raining hard, but that was a good thing because we’re on the dry (west) side of the island. Rain is necessary.

The snow would be falling 13,000 feet up in the mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Perhaps the workers in the observatories atop Mauna Kea were enjoying a break from their scientific endeavors.

Meanwhile we enjoyed a slow start to the day, staring at the puddles forming below our rental apartment, temperatures in the low 70’s.

Eventually the rain paused, and we decided to go for a stroll.

For some reason I find Christmas decorations in the subtropics to be incongruous, so I snapped a couple scenes.

Nothing matched the poinsettias we’d spotted yesterday, growing in a front yard.

Along the way we stopped for a coffee, picked up a bag of Kona beans for our breakfasts, and popped into a barber shop for trims. We were both charged the senior rate; we tipped nicely.

At lunch. I thought the juxtaposition of Dwight and an arrow pointing to the Ladies was cute.

Dwight reciprocated, taking a photo I found informative at the end of the meal.

Such was our Hawaii snow morning. By afternoon things were warming up and the rain seemed temporarily in retreat. A friend in Minnesota, who had noticed the blizzard warning, sent me an email with the subject “Schadenfreude.” I was able to confirm the extreme weather and how temperatures had plummeted into the seventies.

NASA posted satellite photos showing significant snow accumulations on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.